US-Israel war on Iran: A brief history of mission creep and false promises

Wars rarely begin as “forever wars”.

Leaders sell a short, controlled operation with a defined target. But mission creep turns that pitch into a pattern – retaliation cycles, credibility politics, alliance pressures and market shocks – that pull those governments deeper into a crisis and make stopping the assaults harder.

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Governments start with narrow goals (“degrade”, “disrupt”), then drift towards open-ended aims (“restore deterrence”, “force compliance”) – objectives their airpower cannot conclusively deliver.

When the rationale for war becomes abstract, the endpoint becomes negotiable.

How wars become open-ended

The bombs falling on Iran follow a long history of interventions by the United States abroad. President Donald Trump, reportedly encouraged by a military operation in January that abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, boasted of helping to rebuild Venezuela.

However, Venezuela remains embroiled in a protracted political and economic crisis.

In the case of Iran, US allies in Europe were more sceptical as they invoked the lessons for the West from the 2003-2011 Iraq war.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned that Western leaders were “playing Russian roulette” by threatening Iran while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged restraint and warned against destabilising the country.

Their message was that a “limited” military operation is often a pitch for the first few days of a conflict, not a description of what comes next.

But the US insisted it still controlled the narrative – and the events unfolding in the Middle East.

Trump said the US-Israel campaign in Iran could last “four to five weeks”, adding that the war has the “capability to go far longer than that”. That formulation – “short if it goes well, longer if it must” – is one of the oldest accelerants of mission creep.

Why mission creep happens and why it’s hard to contain

Mission creep is a chain reaction. It is accelerated by several factors:

Retaliation ladders: Each side’s “measured response” becomes the other side’s justification for the next strike, quickly shifting the war’s goals and timelines.

Domestic politics, allies and markets: These factors accelerate the slide into open-ended campaigns.

Leaders keep redefining success instead of pausing the attacks because admitting limits to their strategy could mean weakness. Allies add to the pressure as war coalitions fragment under stress, prompting states to take escalatory steps to prove reliability or avoid blame.

Finally, markets act as accelerants as energy prices, shipping insurance, trade disruptions and inflation become part of the ongoing war, forcing leaders to manage the economic effects of the war back home.

Credibility traps: These deepen the crisis as leaders shift focus from concrete tasks (hitting enemy sites, destroying military stockpiles) to abstract goals, such as “resolve” and “deterrence”. Analysts warned that states take risks to defend a war’s credibility even when underlying interests are limited.

Pivoting aims: When initial results disappoint, leaders pivot towards behavioral or political aims, like restoring deterrence or weakening a regime – objectives that airpower alone cannot deliver, turning the “operations” into “systems”.

The historical pattern

From Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Syria, Gaza and now Iran, the pattern of mission creep is clear.

Korean War: US President Harry Truman framed the 1950 aggression as ensuring collective security, but the conflict escalated into a three-year war, entrenching a long-term US military position in South Korea. The fighting ended with an armistice in 1953, leaving the war technically unresolved.

Vietnam War: US escalation of the war, triggered when the US military reported an attack on one of its warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, expanded an initial “response” into a long and costly conflict whose aims kept shifting. The war, which included large-scale aerial herbicide spraying, ended with a US withdrawal in 1973 and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. Later investigations revealed that the Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened.

Iraq and Syria: The First Gulf War in 1991 ended quickly, but the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq set off a conflict that latest nearly nine years. The invasion, sold on claims of weapons of mass destruction, continued with new goals, like political stabilisation, after the original justification collapsed.

Similarly, the 2014 campaign against ISIL (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, despite aiming to avoid a large ground war, still embedded the US in a long-running deployment, illustrating incremental escalation.

Historian Max Paul Friedman noted that successive US presidents repeat the mistake of believing overwhelming military power can substitute for a viable political endgame. While the US has the capacity to “smash up states”, ensuring and installing a better replacement is a far rarer case.

While Trump claims the war in Iran could end in weeks, history – as we saw above – warns us otherwise.

Israel is learning the war playbook from its biggest sponsor: the US, which historically has set a clear pattern on selling a military escalation as “security”, wins the first few battles but then struggles to control what comes next.

Since the 1970s, the so-called Israeli “security” wars have been reshaping the Middle East.

Like the US, Israel’s war on Lebanon is an example of mission creep with a regional twist: Operations framed as border security are repeatedly expanded into deeper campaigns, triggering long-term blowback from forces like Hezbollah.

In 1978, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in what became known as Operation Litani. The United Nations Security Council responded with Resolution 425, calling on Israel to withdraw and creating a peacekeeping force, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

In 1982, Israel launched a broader invasion that reached Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and ended up occupying parts of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah then emerged as a central actor in resisting the Israeli occupation in the south, which continued until 2000.

UNIFIL’s own historical record ties its mandate and continuing presence to that escalation cycle and the repeated failure to stabilise Lebanon’s border.

In the 1990s, Israel ran major military campaigns in Lebanon. These episodes sharpened a pattern that still shapes the region: Leaders promise to restore deterrence quickly, but deterrence becomes a permanent file rather than an outcome.

In 2006, the Israel-Hezbollah war lasted for 33 days and destroyed major infrastructure in Lebanon. The war ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which called for the cessation of hostilities and an expanded monitoring architecture centred on UNIFIL. Diplomats still treat 1701 as a cornerstone framework whenever escalation between Israel and Lebanon spikes precisely because none of the deeper political problems disappeared.

This history matters now because it shows how “bounded” campaigns create new systems: new armed actors, new front lines, new “deterrence” doctrines and a permanent state of tension and escalation.

Gaza: A genocidal war without an end date

Gaza illustrates a corrosive form of mission creep: military operations that are bound to fail with each round of escalation manufacturing the next.

After initial messaging in October 2023 suggested a swift campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the end of that year that the war would continue for “many more months”. He has since dragged it into its third calendar year, leading to catastrophic civilian losses and accusations of genocide.

While human rights groups and UN experts have said Israel has committed genocide or carried out genocidal acts, Israel has rejected the characterisation.

Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and late Hamas commander Mohammed Deif over the war.

What Iran war tells adversaries and allies

Without a clear and credible political end goal, any military action turns into a loop, morphing an “operation” into a “system”.

Rhetoric that accelerates such escalation includes the language of “imminent threat”, which compresses debate and makes a pause (truce, ceasefire) appear reckless.

In Iran’s case, Western leaders have also used nuclear warnings for decades. If a threat is permanently kept “only weeks away”, a war can be permanently presented as “necessary”.

As US and Israeli bombs rain down on Iranian territory, Washington is telling its adversaries – and allies – about energy, shipping and regional stability risks. Meanwhile, their European allies are reaching for the Iraq war analogy early on to avoid being dragged into a conflict that may have outgrown its sales pitch, as was seen with several nations condemning the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war.

The lesson is not how to run a war “better”. It is that leaders often sell a war as “limited” to win permission to start one. Then they incentivise escalation and punish restraint.

The history of modern wars shows how easily leaders meet the rhetorical burden of justification while avoiding the strategic burden of ending a war on terms that do not create the next one.

When war becomes a system, the hardest decision is no longer how to start one but how to stop it.